... but I stopped. Now I'm a dad, and may blog again...

Thursday, November 04, 2010

104: bags, flys, stuff and alveoli

Right, let’s get this over and done with.  There is a rucksack across the room, that has been to Japan and back and waited for hours at Kuala Lumpur airport with me, and now it sits unused on the top shelf of the wardrobe.  In this light and from this angle it looks like a gigantic bluebottle.  The bottom bulges like the boggly compound eyes, and the straps hand in just the places to be mistaken for legs and feelers or antennae or whatever they are called.  It even appears to have wings.  Fortunately they are not too scale so it doesn’t appear too intimidating.  They are more like primitive stumps; evolving knobbles taking early steps up the gradual slopes of Mount Improbable, to paraphrase Richard Dawkins.

Nothing else in the room exactly resembles real things on an entirely unlikely scale.  Except my fingers which are the spitting likeness of microscopic cnidocyte cells of the box jellyfish.  And the bedroom door which viewed from this approach bears a distinct similarity to a satellite photograph of the Amazon delta.  The foot of the bed is a ten inch scale model of the Bradshaw Mountains in Arizona.  The piles of moisturiser and ‘product’ my girlfriend has amassed are a partially dissected frog beginning to recover from its anaesthetic.  The bedside table is a torn out page from the Argos catalogue featuring tents and tenting equipment, screwed up and left on a Subbuteo box.  The curtains are sheets of sandpaper and the window is like a box of chocolates...

Besides these recognisable likenesses there is little of interest.  I could lie on the lawn and stare at the clouds searching for unusual shapes; and I would if it wasn’t covered in cat shit, freezing cold and pitch black.  As it goes I will just have to make do with my giant Calliphora vomitoria.  It waits for me to sleep, disguised as a mostly harmless rucksack.  When I finally drift off she will feed on my decaying meat, leaving her monstrous maggots to gorge their fat wiggly bodies on my decomposing matter.

And this is what I get for watching David Attenborough’s Life in the Undergrowth through the confused fug of a bad cold and a couple of mugs of hot toddy.  A toddy is recommended for anybody experiencing the creeping frost of autumn, but the common cold is so... common.  Blah.  I began this post by saying right, let’s get this over with and the time is upon us.  I ran out of steam at least a paragraph ago, and am now waiting for the word count to catch up.  Unfortunately I have to stop typing every few moments to cough another alveoli into my mouth.  And on that note; bye.

No comments: